The Immigrant Story - "We Are All Immigrants"

The Immigrant Story

Tagline: We are all immigrants

With the recent rise of populism and desire to break the 'bubbles' that we live in, we created "The Immigrant Story" as a way to unite people and show how many shared experiences we have. We are all immigrants (and it's easy for people to forget).

After talking to multiple people, we built the site using storytelling and data visualization to achieve the following:

Telling each person's unique immigrant story

Showing timeline - Data visualizations showing how we interconnected as immigrants with a timeline of the group that we interviewed

Showing Commonalities - Data visualizations that show how we share commonalities as members of 'humanity', such as sharing a love for chocolate ice cream. (We're really a lot more similar than we think!)

How can we help you - Members were asked what they might need, including community, legal assistance, volunteer, e-mail sign-up, etc. Our hope is that we will be able to work with organizations to help individuals on the back-end via anonymous 'craigslist' e-mails

Creating a community of volunteers - connecting a group of individuals united around the immigrant experience and who are interested in volunteering

Helping new immigrants - current feature includes legal assistance, which we would like to expand to include job assistance, housing, immigration and citizenship issues

Everyone is an immigrant

How we built it

A combination of node.js and d3.js

What's next for The Immigrant Project

Extending features to include partnerships with corporate sponsors, e.g. IBM-sponsored profiles, continued surveys of the population, local activism

Building the community will grow with time

Adding links to social services and not-for-profits who provide assistance